NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Fights and trash fires broke out, rescue
helicopters were shot at and anger mounted across New Orleans
on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured
in to help restore order across this increasingly desperate and
lawless city.

''We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help,''
the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention
Center, where corpses lay in the open and evacuees complained
that they were dropped off and given nothing.

An additional 10,000 National Guardsman from across the country
were ordered into the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up
security, rescue and relief operations in Katrina's wake as looting,
shootings, gunfire, carjackings spread and food and water ran
out.

But some Federal Emergency Management rescue operations were
suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, Homeland Security
spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington. ''In areas where our
employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we
have pulled back,'' he said.

''Hospitals are trying to evacuate,'' said Coast Guard Lt.
Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations
center. ''At every one of them, there are reports that as the
helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people
just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them,
''You better come get my family.

Police Capt. Ernie Demmo said a National Guard military policeman
was shot in the leg as the two scuffled for the MP's rifle. The
man was arrested.

''These are good people. These are just scared people,'' Demmo
said.

The Superdome, where some 25,000 people were being evacuated
by bus to the Houston Astrodome, descended into chaos.

Huge crowds, hoping to finally escape the stifling confines
of the stadium, jammed the main concourse outside the dome, spilling
out over the ramp to the Hyatt hotel next door -- a seething
sea of tense, unhappy, people packed shoulder-to-shoulder up
to the barricades where heavily armed National Guardsmen stood.

Fights broke out. A fire erupted in a trash chute inside the
dome, but a National Guard commander said it did not affect the
evacuation. After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving at the
Sueprdome for nearly four hours, a near riot broke out in the
scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up.

Outside the Convention Center, the sidewalks were packed with
people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign
of law enforcement. Thousands of storm refugees had been assembling
outside for days, waiting for buses that did not come.

At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry,
desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the
steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out
pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median
as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly
woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and
another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

''I don't treat my dog like that,'' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards
said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. ''I buried
my dog.'' He added: ''You can do everything for other countries
but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas
with the military but you can't get them down here.''

Just above the convention center on Interstate 10, commercial
buses were lined up, going nowhere. The street outside the center,
above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked
with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.

''They've been teasing us with buses for four days,'' Edwards
said.

People chanted, ''Help, help!'' as reporters and photographers
walked through. The crowd got angry when journalists tried to
photograph one of the bodies, and covered it over with a blanket.
A woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention
center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm.

John Murray, 52, said: ''It's like they're punishing us.''

The first of hundreds of busloads of people evacuated from
the Superdome arrived early Thursday at their new temporary home
-- another sports arena, the Houston Astrodome, 350 miles away.

But the ambulance service in charge of taking the sick and
injured from the Superdome suspended flights after a shot was
reported fired at a military helicopter. Richard Zuschlag, chief
of Acadian Ambulance, said it had become too dangerous for his
pilots.

The military, which was overseeing the removal of the able-bodied
by buses, continued the ground evacuation without interruption,
said National Guard Lt. Col. Pete Schneider. The government had
no immediate confirmation of whether a military helicopter was
fired on.

In Texas, the governor's office said Texas has agreed to take
in an additional 25,000 refugees from Katrina and plans to house
them in San Antonio, though exactly where has not been determined.

In Washington, the White House said President Bush will tour
the devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his
father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President
Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.

The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.

''I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking
the law during an emergency such as this -- whether it be looting,
or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of
charitable giving or insurance fraud,'' Bush said. ''And I've
made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to
be working together.''

On Wednesday, Mayor Ray Nagin offered the most startling estimate
yet of the magnitude of the disaster: Asked how many people died
in New Orleans, he said: ''Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands.''
The death toll has already reached at least 121 in Mississippi.

If the estimate proves correct, it would make Katrina the
worst natural disaster in the United States since at least the
1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which was blamed for
anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be
the nation's deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in
Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.

Nagin called for a total evacuation of New Orleans, saying
the city had become uninhabitable for the 50,000 to 100,000 who
remained behind after the city of nearly a half-million people
was ordered cleared out over the weekend, before Katrina blasted
the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds.

The mayor said that it will be two or three months before
the city is functioning again and that people would not be allowed
back into their homes for at least a month or two.

''We need an effort of 9-11 proportions,'' former New Orleans
Mayor Marc Morial, now president of the Urban League, said on
NBC's ''Today'' show. ''So many of the people who did not evacuate,
could not evacuate for whatever reason. They are people who are
African-American mostly but not completely, and people who were
of little or limited economic means. They are the folks, we've
got to get them out of there.''

''A great American city is fighting for its life,'' he added.
''We must rebuild New Orleans, the city that gave us jazz, and
music, and multiculturalism.''

''They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas
-- hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now,''
Nagin said.

In a sign of growing lawlessness, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked
authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning
hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water
and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.

The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two
levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans
thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The
floodwaters covered 80 percent of the city, in some areas 20
feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty
Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone
into a 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall.

But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags
and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the
city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large
debris.

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu toured the stricken areas said said
rescued people begged him to pass information to their families.
His pocket was full of scraps of paper on which he had scribbled
down their phone numbers.

When he got a working phone in the early morning hours Thursday,
he contacted a woman whose father had been rescued and told her:
''Your daddy's alive, and he said to tell you he loves you.''

''She just started crying. She said, `I thought he was dead,'''
he said.